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Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

© 2023 by the Ukrainian History and Education Center, all rights reserved.

How many people died in the Holodomor?

There has been considerable controversy over the decades regarding the number of deaths directly attributable the Holodomor, with estimates ranging from about one million on the extreme low end to eight to ten million on the extreme high end. Recent scholarly opinion has been gradually settling towards the upper end of the 2.5 to 4 million range, though that is still far from unanimous. While knowing the number is important, we feel that this is a task best left to historians and demographers who specialize in this type of work. It certainly is not something that we at the UHEC have any expertise in or would be in a position to critically evaluate.

Frankly, we may never know the real number. To understand why, we need only look at the recent pandemic. No matter what estimate was made of the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19, somebody would invariably dispute that figure as being biased and claim that it was a significant over- or underestimate. And that's despite the presence of essentially complete official death records. The situation in Ukraine in the 1930s makes such estimates significantly more challenging. It is known that there were severe breakdowns in governmental record keeping in 1933, and there are also major issues with reliability of the 1937 and 1939 Soviet censuses (even if we disregard the official statistics published at the time, which are known to contain wholesale fabrications). This makes any demographic analysis incredibly difficult.

In some respects, debates about the exact number of deaths are a distraction from the bigger picture. Even if the number of deaths directly attributable to the Holodomor was "only" 2 million, that is still an astounding number, especially if we consider how short of a time period those deaths occurred in. It is indisputable that these deaths, regardless of the exact number, had a massive traumatic impact on Ukraine and its people. And the impact is even greater if we consider all of the collateral effects, such as a greatly decreased birthrate, the "demographic echo" of that population loss over the decades, and the simultaneous attack on Ukrainian language and culture during that period.

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What exactly was the Holodomor? The Holodomor was a genocidal artificial famine engineered by Soviet government under Stalin that took place in Ukraine and other regions with significant Ukrainian ethnic populations in 1932 and 1933. The term "Holodomor" literally means "killing by famine" and derives from the Ukrainian words "holod" ("famine") and "moryty" ("to kill").

The Holodomor was the result of acts of omission and commission by the Soviet authorities. While there were food shortages and famines in multiple regions of the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in Ukraine and the Kuban region of the northern Caucasus the famine took a substantially different course. Not only was no relief provided to the starving, but measures were intentionally taken that guaranteed an even larger death toll among the very people who produced the food — the village farmers.

That death toll reached mind-boggling proportions. There were millions of deaths, constituting perhaps 20-30% of the population in the countryside. These deaths occurred very rapidly, with perhaps 30,000 daily cases of excess mortality at the famine's peak in the late spring and early summer of 1933. Urban areas were not shielded from the impact: in addition to hunger (though not as extreme as in the countryside), city dwellers were faced with dead or dying villagers who had come to find food.

Recent scholarship has made a very strong case that the staggering death rate during the Holodomor was the result of intentional actions by the Soviet regime that meet the definition of genocide. The goal of the Holodomor was never to physically destroy all Ukrainians. That is not a necessary condition for it to be considered a genocide: the 1948 UN "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" includes in its definition "Deliberately inflicting on [a national, ethnical, racial or religious] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" (emphasis added).
The Holodomor as cultural genocide
Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" and was the author of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, had a more expansive view that included cultural destruction as a significant component of the concept of genocide. Lemkin's early draft texts of the Convention had cultural destruction as part of the definition of genocide, but this was eliminated due to opposition from former European colonial powers and by nations whose history included the displacement and cultural disintegration of indigenous peoples (including the United States, Canada, Australia, and Brazil).

The targeting of Ukraine's agricultural base during the Holodomor was not an accident. It is hard to overstate the importance that agriculture has had in traditional Ukrainian society. Ukraine is at the western end of the extraordinarily fertile belt of chornozem ("black earth" or "black soil") that stretches across Eurasia. For centuries, most Ukrainians had lived in a society that was deeply linked to that land and to the cycles of nature. Collectivization, the Holodomor, and related anti-Ukrainian policies in the 1930s were a direct assault on those age-old traditions and institutions. They made obsolete many traditional occupations and trades, such as icon painters and itinerant musicians. It eliminated or severely restricted ancient cultural practices like weddings and seasonal rituals that had associated with them vast numbers of customs, songs, and traditions. The catastrophic impact that this had on the countryside was yet another aspect of the genocidal nature of the Holodomor era that went far beyond the actual famine.

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What is it like to have 30,000 excess deaths per day?